A Secret Life

by Benjamin Weiser (PublicAffairs; $27.50)

Books about espionage, fiction or not, can be cliché flypaper—encrusted with tired plot twists and morbid atmosphere. Exceptions, like John le Carré’s novels and Thomas Powers’s histories, are rare. But Weiser’s tale of how a high-ranking Polish officer, Ryszard Kuklinski, betrayed the communist leadership for almost a decade, starting in 1972, and fed the Americans thousands of pages of top-secret documents, including the plans for martial law, is in that elevated company. “A Secret Life” is thrilling not only in its chronicle of an honorable betrayal during the Cold War’s endgame but also in its portrait of the strangely loving epistolary relationship between the spy and his American handlers. There are scenes here that are as tense as any in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” and the access that Weiser gained—his sources include both Kuklinski and the Poles he fooled—is a feat of patient and intelligent reporting.♦